If there’s one thing people like about weddings (there’s honestly not many things people enjoy about them), it’s the post wedding celebration ceremonies. This is when people become too hammered to put together coherent thoughts, they hit on brides maids, they dance like crazy, get to finally eat and mingle to the people that they want to mingle with, assumingly avoiding in-laws. When planning out a ceremony, remember that it’s not all about drinking and making fools out of yourselves.

You should be planning out your ceremony around celebrating the rejoice and the success of a marriage ceremony that went through without a hitch. You shouldn’t have to be stressed over the planning of something this minor. Believe me, the groom is far more stressed about dancing since most men cannot dance for some reason. I mean, it’s just basic feet movement but that’s another issue for another article.

The ceremony is a time where you can relax, fatten up your dress with some cake and let the real party begin before the honeymoon. Now, this might go against everything that wedding planners tell you but you need to invite more people than you think will actually come to the wedding. This is for good reason because you invite just the right amount, the room might look like it’s too few short and if you invite too many, the room will look just right. This doesn’t mean invite anyone and everyone as you don’t want everyone to show up and not have the budget to cater to them, so there are limits.

Make sure that you mail out all of your save the date cards before you actually send your invitations out. Remember that the goal with this is to make sure people can get time off of work since they’ll have to plan this far in advance. If you do this months in advance, more people will be able to show up and get some time off work.

Remember to delegate as much of the work as possible and let other people help you with the planning. The ceremony is the last thing that’s usually planned or gets taken into consideration so when you’re stressed and burned out from planning, you could end up batching your own ceremony plans. Also, remember not to stress over the small things as there’s really no point in stressing over them.

Schedule and plan out all of the events. Don’t just assume you’ll figure out the itinerary on the day of or try to put it together last minute. The band, the caterer and all these people you hired are on strict schedules (expensive ones too). It’s much easier to track everything if you plan out events and times those events occurs on paper.

Look, rehearsals aren’t fun but they’re very much so needed during the planning process. You need to make sure everyone knows what they’re doing and they’re ready for the big day. Not rehearsing could have stressful results for you and hilarious results for everyone else.